About Me

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

`Receding Like the Light, Like the Shadows'

“This
is a bad time, / bad for poetry.”

So
speaks Daniel Hoffman channeling the voice of Louise Bogan in “The Sonnet” (Makes You Stop and Think: Sonnets,
2005). I learned of Hoffman’s death at age eighty-nine on Saturday after reading
Joseph Epstein’s obituary for contemporary verse – “…the poetry game is over,
kaput, fini, time, gentlemen, time.” -- and before reading David Yezzi likening
it to “a spayed housecat lolling in a warm patch of sun.” In an interview he
gave to Boulevard in 1989, Hoffman
recalled inviting Bogan to speak at Swarthmore College in the nineteen-sixties.
He admits feeling relieved Bogan had never reviewed his work in The New Yorker, describing her as “a
formalist exclusively.” In the company of “disheveled youth,” he remembered her
as “poised yet beleaguered.” When Hoffman learned of Bogan’s death in 1970, he
wrote “The Sonnet” to honor her memory. In the interview he says:

“And
here I was responding to the endlessly and boringly reiterated gestures of
rebellion, of rejection of the formal principles of art that I’ve spoken of,
and the emergence of the formless poem as the style of the decade.”

Hoffman’s
own work straddles both worlds. Never “a formalist exclusively,” his early
poems were sometimes rhymed, often metrically regular. He was never sloppy, rarely
self-indulgent, but changed with the times, loosening up over the decades without
descending into propaganda, nihilism or the more egregious forms of
sentimentality – the abiding sins of contemporary poetry. Here is one of
Hoffman’s finest later poems, “Going,” from Darkening
Water: Poems (2002):

“Your
time has come, the yellowed

light
of the weary sun

wavers
in the foliage.

It’s
no use, no use to linger.

So,
goodbye, day. See,

the
shadows join each other

as
the air turns shadow

and
the light fails. You

are
gone, gone into the ghostly

light
of all my days, of all

my
hungers only partially assuaged,

of
all desires

which
in the rush of hours

I
reached and stooped to grasp.

They’re
gone, receding like the light,

like
the shadows, receding

into
subsidence, to come

again
as the day comes,

as
the night

comes,
bringing its own

going
in its coming

again,
and again.”

I
have no reason to think Hoffman read Samuel Beckett, and I’m not claiming
influence, but the poem’s halting lull, its hesitant momentum, reminds me of Beckett’s
mature prose rhythms, most famously in the concluding words of The Unnamable:

“Perhaps
it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried
me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that
would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I
am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go
on, I can't go on, I'll go on.”